ANNE SEXTON: TRANSFORMATIONS
Transformations was Sexton’s cheekily nihilistic and cheerfully cynical 1971 take on the tales of Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, Snow White, and their comrades. In Sexton’s vision Snow White becomes a vain, vindictive creature much like the evil queen who condemned her to death. Mother Gothel, who kept Rapunzel locked up in a tower, ends as a tragically lonely and heartbroken old woman. And Sleeping Beauty’s story ends as she becomes an insomniac who cries out for her father to comfort her but instead is sexually abused. That Sexton committed suicide three years after the publication of Transformations gives the poems a particularly chilling and desperate edge.
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This staged reading is a good introduction to Sexton’s work, but it never fully succeeds in bringing the words to life. The magic of Sexton’s poems is that they leap off the page and into reality. Thunder Road’s adaptation made me wish the words would jump out of reality and back onto the page, so I could read them at my own pace in private.
